Marc Bloch: a life in history (review)

Reviews 249 While Field suggests that the Morte Darthur should be used more assiduously as an historical document than it has been, and promises to do so, be is fairly sparing in his own use. He does, however, read thetextand the times against each other to offer an illuminating interpretation of the outburst in the Morte Darthur against the 'political fickleness' of Englishmen. H e suggests that this may reflect Malory's own bad conscience in having deserted the Lancastrian Henry VI, a guilt which would explain why he resumed his allegiancetothat king, even after Henry's defeat and imprisonment. In his conclusion Field returns to this point, yet insists on its tentative and conditional nature. For all the confident tide and the wealth of meticulous research,tenaciousargumentation and astute speculation, Field's conclusion is that whatever links may be made between life andtimes,life andtext,or times andtext,are elusive and likely to remain so. It is not only the gaps in the records which lead him to this position. H e also falls back upon the argument from genre that the Morte Darthur is after all a romance, a fiction. The implication of that is that we are left, not with what Malory did or felt, but with what he wrote. Earlier versions of much of the material in the book have already appeared in the form of journal articles. While it is convenient to have all the material together, and valuable to have the results of subsequent research, it oughttobe expected that a book would provide a bibliography. Joy Wallace School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies Charles Sunt University, Bathurst Fink, Carole, Marc Bloch: a life in history, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; paper; pp. xix, 371; 30 figures; R.R.P. AUS$16.95 In the Annales pantheon, Marc Bloch has always been accorded a special place, not just as one of the two founders of the school which rescued French historical writing from late nineteenth-century documentary idolatry, but as the 'new' history'sfirstmartyr and its finest spirit. For Bloch died at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944, when to be young and Annalien, was to be a true historian. This was long before the school surrendered its undoubted intellectual capital to academic politicization and to the pedantocracy which now rules in its name. There was about Bloch, one 250 Reviews instinctively feels, little of the wearying polemic, the mechanical 'structuralism', or the rhetorical flatulence that beset his confrere Lucien Febvre and his successor Feniand Braudel. Carole Fink has written thefirstfull-scale biography of Bloch, showing with an admirable thoroughness and sympathy die interconnections of his academic and family life, of his Jewish and French patriotic identity, of his political engagement, and of his cerebral or intellectual concerns. The result is an absorbing and exciting book. The Bloch who emerges is much less of a plasterboard saint, the Saint Marc of subsequent Annales hagiography, and a more conventionally ambitious and acerbic academic player. He was certainly a historian of genius, but he expected proper academic acknowledgement. He was a man of instatiable curiosity and enormous energy who was nonetheless ambiguous and unclear in articulating his position as a well-connected assimilated secular Jew who also saw himself as a tine French patriot in die France of the interwar period. Fink handles the relationship of Bloch and Febvre with care and insight. This was 'a loyal and productive' partnership, to be sure, but one increasingly beset by differences and tensions as the younger man forged an independent and a superior academic reputation and as the older tried to balance his regard for Bloch's Jewish sensibilities with survival and political correctness in an anti-semitic environment. Fink also sheds much new light on the moral and political choices facing Bloch in Vichy France and provides a detailed and moving account of their resolution: die reclamation of 'his maimed citizenship' in the Resistance and in death. Fink's book provides a clear and helpful exposition of his writing and scholarship. Yet something of the man and of his work escapes her painstaking study. There is little sense of what Eugen Weber has referred to as...